Goodbye logstripper

As of today, logstripper is no more. With this post, I’d like to explain why
I have decided to pull the plug on it, and what you can do if you were still
using it.

Logstripper was an application I built in my spare time more than three years
ago, back before display names even existed. The introduction of display
names made it less effective by breaking some of the algorithms used to detect
people’s names, but despite of that, I’ve kept it running all that time because
I know some people continued to use it.

However, maintaining an application, even such a simple one as logstripper, takes
time, effort and money. I pay for server costs (and strongly refuse to put up
ads as compensation) and every now and again, I have to upgrade the versions
of the software used because security vulnerabilities in that software are found.
Usually this is a straightforward process of incrementing a version number, but
sometimes new versions are not backward-compatible and further changes have to
be made.

I’ve now reached the point where, after doing this for quite a while, I no longer
find it worth the effort. In all the time of running it, nobody has given me any
kind of thank you or even made a small donation, and personally, I’m not happy
with some of the technological aspects of how the application was built.

I’ve occasionally considered making a newer version of logstripper, and also toyed
with the idea of making it a HUD of some kind that allows for recordings to be
started and stopped in-world without having to manually copy-and-paste logs over,
but I remain unconvinced it would be worth the effort to write.

If you were one of the people who still used logstripper, and would like to see
it return in some form or another, I would be happy to hear from you. Please let
me know your thoughts and ideas either in the comments below or by
emailing me directly. I make no promises, but if enough
people show an interest, I’d be happy to build something new.